Pizza party tale warms hearts; fills kids' bellies

Anytime someone opens a story with the phrase “faith in humanity restored,” I am all ears. We can’t get enough of these kinds of stories.

Well, get ready to have your faith in humanity restored.

Here’s the scene: 2-year-old Hazel Hammersley was diagnosed with stage three neuroblastoma in April and will require an 18-month hospital treatment, according to people.com.

I can only imagine how exhausted this family already is.

This week, during one of her hospital stays, Hazel’s mother, Lauren, grabbed some medical tape and decided to have some fun. She spelled out “Send pizza, room 4112” on the window of their room in Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.

She probably didn’t expect what happened next.

The tape stayed on the window for a few days, then someone posted a photo of the makeshift sign on Reddit.com, a high-traffic Internet forum. Then the pizzas came. And kept coming, and kept coming.

The hospital was so overwhelmed by pizzas from across the country that the family had to graciously request that they stop.

You know that feeling when you give something to someone that they weren’t expecting and that they really love?

When their faces light up, it is simply one of the Best. Feelings. Ever.

Perhaps God gets just as much of a kick out of blessing us. I can just see Him up in heaven as “Hazelnut’s” mother stuck that tape to the window. Maybe He grinned, cracked his knuckles and whispered “challenge accepted.”

So what did they do with all those pizzas? Threw a pizza party for the whole floor, of course!

“Hazel woke up from her nap to the smell of pizza and was so excited to chow down! Several other children and nurses came into the room, with music playing, and had themselves a wonderful pizza party,” Lauren wrote on her blog, Our Little Hazelnut. “We had such a great time!”

There are a lot of things about God that are mysterious. But one thing is overwhelmingly evident: whenever He lavishes His great, abundant love on us, it is often delivered by other people.